In order to meet the challenge raised by unreliable communication
leading to lost messages, agents must not depend on communication to
act. Communication is structured so that it helps agents update their
world and internal states. But agents do not stop acting while
waiting for communications from teammates. As brought up
in [38], such a case could cause infinite looping if a
critical teammate fails to respond for any reason. As well as
continuing to act while waiting for communicate-delay to expire,
agents ensure that they do not rely on inter-agent communication by
continuing to act while waiting for responses from teammates. They
also maintain world and internal states without help from teammates.
Communication can improve the reliability of an agent's world state by
elucidating some of an agent's hidden state; but communication is not
necessary for an agent to maintain a reasonable approximation of the
world state.